Tuesday, July 17, 2007

I am taking a break from open source, in terms of writing open source software and spending my time working with an "open source" company. My recent experiences in working full time in open source have not been very positive or pleasant. The focus has shifted - in my new avatar I won't have to think about open source as a problem to solve.

Does it mean I will stop looking into open source altogether ? No, for a couple of reasons - now a days open source is all pervasive and you need to keep in touch with it if you want to be in sync with the changes happening in the software landscape around you, of which you are a part. It still remains the best way for a developer to publish his original ideas and then take it to a larger audience with almost zero effort; also, a lot of quality projects and products are open source, which means though your product might be proprietary it is influenced by open source, directly (through borrowing code) or indirectly (through borrowing ideas/algorithms).

I will be working on HarvestMan also which will remain as an open source project.

In fact, the main changes are in two things.

1. The name of this blog has changed - It no longer has open source in it :)2. I wont be paid to write tools for open source integration or making use of open source in commercial enterprises - I am out of that business - entirely.

Perhaps one day I will be back to that business. Of course the software landscapekeeps changing daily and the "open source companies" of the future would be mostly having totally different business models from the current ones - an interesting future to watch out for.

Friday, July 13, 2007

About 2 months after HarvestMan moved from freezope to the new site, it is nice to note that is back up in the top 10 Google queries for "HarvestMan". In fact, I note it is the 10th result as of writing this post.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

There is a rather old article on computerworld website. The article talks about what it calls the recent "scramble" to create application stacks for enterprises using open source components. The criticism is that the market does not really exist but is a rather hyped up buzzword. One tends to draw subtle parallels with push technology of the heady dotcom days in one's mind. The technology existed, but it was trying to solve a problem that did not exist.

Open source stack vendors seems to be in a similar situation, developing solutions in search of a problem. When will this hype cycle burst ?